Joseph O'Reilly (1865-1893) Contributions Earnestly Solicited Oil on canvas, 91 x 61cm (35¾ x 24'') Signed and dated 1890. Inscribed with title verso. Exhibited: R.H.A. annual exhibition 1891,...

Joseph O'Reilly (1865-1893) Contributions Earnestly Solicited Oil on canvas, 91 x 61cm (35¾ x 24'') Signed and dated 1890. Inscribed with title verso. Exhibited: R.H.A. annual exhibition 1891, cat. no. 97, for £30. Born in Dublin and educated at The Royal Hibernian Academy School, Joseph O'Reilly won numerous prizes for his paintings. He was awarded a bronze and a silver medal, and by 1887 had won the The Albert Scholarship, quickly establishing himself as a landscape and figure painter, and commanding robust prices for the titles that he showed at the R.H.A. between 1885 and 1893. This was the work that won him The Taylor Scholarship, enabling him to travel to Paris to paint. He was encouraged to make this trip by celebrated Irish impressionist and portrait painter Walter Osborne (1859-1903). Taylor was evidently much influenced by Osborne, who had himself won the same scholarship and spent time painting in France in the early 1880's. There are striking similarities between this painting and Osborne's 'A Tempting Bait' (shown at the RHA in 1883, no. 129), especially in the pose of the begging fox terrier, and that of the young boy looking down at his dog, with his ankles crossed and legs dangling. Osborne's arrangement is darker, and its story, with a rat-trap being set, is more strongly narrative. Walter Osborne's father William Osborne, was also a prolific painter of animals, and his painting of 'The Dogs' Parliament' (exhibited RHA 1887) shows a terrier in a closely similar pose to O'Reilly's. As a way of successfully demonstrating his artistic talents, O'Reilly seems deliberately to have set himself the challenge of depicting light on a variety of surfaces: metal, earthenware, glass, bare flesh, draped wool and eggshell. His choice of objects is a favourite one of earlier genre painters, who often arranged vignettes such as the one shown here in the lower left corner, to show off their skills at painting difficult transparent or reflective things. The scene hovers between farm kitchen and studio. His small boy sits on a Thonet bentwood chair, but the rest of the props are more suggestive of an Irish farmhouse. The spaniel sits high to beg on a creepie stool draped with a cloth, the striped blue and white jug rests on a Carpenters' Chair, and in the background, where sunlight falls through the window, is a scrubbed-top table of a type common in Irish farmhouses. Strickland considered O'Reilly's work to be 'brilliant and successful', but it was cut short by his death of consumption, aged only 28, so his surviving works are very rare. By Claudia Kinmonth PhD M.A. (R.C.A.) author of Irish Country Furniture 1700-1950 & Irish Rural Interiors in Art (Yale University Press, 1993, 2006).

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